- First
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- Nov 07, 2020
Robert J Sawyer Quotes
Most Famous Robert J Sawyer Quotes of All Time!
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- Last Updated on May 30, 2021
- Nov 07, 2020
Science fiction's power, if it has any, is that it gives us reasonable extrapolations, not wild and woolly stuff.
- Heart
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- Nov 07, 2020
The heart and soul of good writing is research; you should write not what you know but what you can find out about.
- Fiction Writer
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- Nov 07, 2020
You can't be a 21st-century science fiction writer writing about Mars without doing tips of the hat to Edgar Rice Burroughs, to Ray Bradbury, to H.G. Wells, to the guys who first put it in the public imagination that Mars was an exciting place.
- Earth
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- Nov 07, 2020
The single best thing about Mars is the reduced gravity. It's 38 percent of Earth's gravity - about one third. Almost never have you seen that portrayed in film or television. Mars is just portrayed as a place that's got reddish sand but is otherwise pretty much identical to the Mojave Desert, and that's not the case.
- Lawyers
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- Nov 07, 2020
The only shows that Americans watch in big numbers are shows about lawyers, doctors, or cops... People don't tune in to watch scientists unless they are forensic scientists.
- Like
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- Nov 07, 2020
I'm often characterized as an optimistic writer, and certainly my 'Neanderthal Parallax' and 'WWW' trilogies shade toward the utopian. I like to think that's not simple naivete, but rather a reasonable approach.
- Halves
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- Nov 07, 2020
I really strived to give equal weight to the two halves of my genre's name: science and fiction.
- Hard
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- Nov 07, 2020
Hard science fiction, which is what I write, often is rightly criticized for having either negligible or unbelievable characterization, but the science I've actually studied most post-secondarily is psychology, and characterization is the art of dramatizing psychological principles.
- Point Of View
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- Nov 07, 2020
Real people are complex, contradictory, and have their own motivations - they can't just be mouthpieces for the writers' point of view.
- Look
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- Nov 07, 2020
If you look at the United States, most of the country is pretty much uninhabited.
- More
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- Nov 07, 2020
I was paid more for the serialization rights for each book than I got as an advance for my first novel. In other words, there is an economic value in serialization in and of itself.
- Nothing
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- Nov 07, 2020
The general public still thinks that science fiction has nothing to do with their day-to-day lives.
- Fall
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- Nov 07, 2020
You fall into a black hole, and you are irretrievably gone from the universe. That finality has made it irresistible to writers.
- Mask
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- Nov 07, 2020
Psychopathy might lurk behind the mask of sanity.
- Political
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- Nov 07, 2020
Science fiction should not be dismissed as escapism. It is a profound vehicle for talking about social and political issues.
- People
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- Nov 07, 2020
Everything that I can do to ground the story in reality helps make it harder for people to be dismissive of it.
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
I started wondering why it is that people line up behind charismatic leaders. It's easy to understand the emergence of a figure who's narcissistic and compelling. But why people follow this person mindlessly - that was the hard question to me.
- People
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- Nov 07, 2020
In addition to psychopaths, 'Quantum Night' is also a novel about literally thoughtless people, without inner voices, thoughts in their heads.
- Mother
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- Nov 07, 2020
My mother is an American.
- Father
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- Nov 07, 2020
Social progress is a big thing for me. Although science fiction is traditionally concerned with the hard sciences, which is chemistry, physics, and, some might argue, biology, my father was and still is a social scientist at the University of Toronto.
- Like
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- Nov 07, 2020
Whether it's created in a lab, written by a programmer, or lands on the White House lawn as a visitor from the stars, if it acts like a human being, it is a human being.
- He Or She
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- Nov 07, 2020
A writer needs to write, period. He or she can't wait for the muse, shouldn't need peace and quiet, and isn't entitled to perfect conditions or the perfect spot.
- He Or She
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- Nov 07, 2020
Writing is transmogrifying, not just for the reader but also for the author; an author becomes someone he or she isn't by living the lives of his or her characters.
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
I'm much more interested in writing about the things that engage and enrage me as an adult rather than in wallowing in childhood sorrows.
- Best
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- Nov 07, 2020
In the best atheist sense of the word, I feel blessed.
- I Am
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- Nov 07, 2020
I am very pro-science.
- Evidence
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- Nov 07, 2020
I'm a rationalist. And I can see no evidence for a benevolent and interventionist creator.
- Had
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- Nov 07, 2020
I've had many of my books optioned.
- Intellectual
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- Nov 07, 2020
Once we no longer have the intellectual upper hand, then we quite literally, by definition, cannot outwit our successors. So unless we are absolutely sure that the machines we are building right now are not going to eventually become our new robot overlords, prudence is called for.
- Nasty
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- Nov 07, 2020
All the things that made us basically nasty, rapacious, competitive as a species are not necessarily hard-coded into whatever passes for the DNA of artificial intelligence.
- Always
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- Nov 07, 2020
Science fiction has always used metaphors and disguises, talking about alien civilizations or the future.
- Just
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- Nov 07, 2020
Sci-fi is just as much about social science as technology.
- Health
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- Nov 07, 2020
We absolutely do some of the best science in the world in Canada, across a broad spectrum of disciplines: quantum computing in Waterloo, paleontology in Alberta, neuroscience at the Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health in Vancouver, and many more.
- Looking
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- Nov 07, 2020
Science fiction is about extrapolation, looking back through history, spotting a trend, and predicting where it will go.
- Science
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- Nov 07, 2020
One of the standard story-generating engines for science fiction is to take something we normally think of as metaphoric and treat it as if it were literal.
- Physics
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- Nov 07, 2020
The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics is the world's greatest pure physics thinktank, and it's located here in Canada, in Waterloo, Ont.
- Nature
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- Nov 07, 2020
If you like 'The Nature of Things,' or if you like 'Quirks and Quarks' you'll certainly like Lee Smolin's writing, and 'Time Reborn' is his latest nonfiction book, and it's an absolutely compelling read. It's worth the time.
- People
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- Nov 07, 2020
I'm a very skeptical guy: my willing suspension of disbelief doesn't go very far when I'm reading other people's SF, and it goes even less far when I'm writing my own.
- Peace
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- Nov 07, 2020
I've long said that if Canada has a role on the world stage, it's principally as a role model, a demonstration that people of all types can get together and live in peace and harmony, which is something we really do most of the time here.
- Book
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- Nov 07, 2020
I frankly couldn't imagine being a series mystery-fiction writer, churning out book after book about the same viewpoint character.
- People
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- Nov 07, 2020
Fiction is all about vicarious experiences and getting into other people's heads in a way that no other art form lets you.
- Short
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- Nov 07, 2020
A short story is one idea; a novel is a whole soup of them.
- Nov 07, 2020
A short story is the shortest distance between two points; a novel is the scenic route.
- Quality
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- Nov 07, 2020
There's always been a quality to being a science-fiction reader. Usually, you're the only one in your class, or there are only one or two in your whole town. You're always the guy who reads that strange stuff.
- Live
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- Nov 07, 2020
Everything is cross-platform now. That's part of the reality that we live in - a multifaceted, multimedia world - and I'm delighted to be a part of that.
- Die
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- Nov 07, 2020
You have to have confidence in where you're going. Don't live and die by the fans' tweets.
- Haunting
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- Nov 07, 2020
What Bradbury had that most other science-fiction writers didn't have at that time was a love for beautiful language, evocative description, and haunting phrases that would stick with the reader.
- Like
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- Nov 07, 2020
Bradbury was the one guy who was published in places like the 'Saturday Evening Post.' He was the guy who brought science fiction to the masses. If he hadn't existed, science fiction would have been a well-kept secret in literature instead of a widely consumed phenomenon.
- General Public
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- Nov 07, 2020
I think there's always been, to some degree, a misunderstanding about what science fiction is all about, in that it has been judged by the general public as being literature of prediction, and it isn't.
- Future
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- Nov 07, 2020
Science fiction has never been about the future; it's always been about the present day whether it's Victorian England that Wells was writing about or the post-9/11 era that I'm writing about.
- People
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- Nov 07, 2020